Tag Archives: professor singh

this weekend was poetry, community, it was being santa’s helper at the neighborhood association holiday party for the battered women’s shelter, it was healing and god bless it, it was music. now it’s monday. i woke up thinking about belinda carlisle, they say in heaven love comes first, ooh heaven is a place on earth. and now i’m listening to begum akhtar, chilling.

if you’re in the midst of finals like me, then you know how tempting it is to place yourself on the back burner while academia blazes to the foreground, all up in you. but the immortal bob marley sings, “don’t let em fool you, or even try to school you,” and i think he was dead on.

look, no matter what, there is an order of care for each and every human being. folks are buckling under the stress all the time, and that’s not cool, so don’t forget the rules. there’s an order of care you must attend to.

first, attend to the spirit, the mind. for me, that means taking a moment to meditate, to pray, and breathe, in order to get present. second, attend to the body. a flexible body, an alive body lets out the ideas and words for those papers with so much ease. plus, it’s hard to write a 20 pager when your hacking up a lung. i’m just saying. third, home. keep your home tight, smelling good, kitchen churning out something healthy, even if it’s just juice, still, keeping the hearth functional is crucial to these paper writing days. fourth, everything else, in whatever order, one at a time.

deadlines breathing down your neck, but the order of care never changes. only you can get these papers done, final time can be so isolating, but let’s not forget that our connectedness to the earth never wavers for a moment.

much love,

roopa

p.s. i’ma be blogging at the end of the week, taking a few days off to focus on these papers. xoxoxox

today marked the last class session of hip hop politics at pace. i have to say, i am so thankful to have shared the space with the 32 student-teachers who ran with me all semester. i learned a lot from them, hopefully they learned a bit from me, and i can’t wait to see them do their damn thing in the 4th annual hip hop politics performance.

i’m speaking on a panel at rutgers this morning, at the 5th Annual Women of Color Initiatives Symposium. we’re going to be talking about what it’s like to wear multiple hats out here, and also what it means to form community, and compartmentalize identities in order to get farther and ahead as brown and black women. here’s the flier.